International Madness

Saturday afternoon, Aldo, Saori, and I went to see one of Saori's friend's murals in a huge contemporary art exhibition. I was hooked on the idea when I learned that the exhibition was going to be held in the Palacio Correo, the same building slated for Nicolas' renovation/intervention. The building is in really sad shape, although it has some really cool spaces. The exhibition, Studio Abierto, occupied three floors and was the usual mix of hyper-contemporary mixed media art. With all the videos, room installations, and experiantial spaces, my favorite piece was a simple line of framed photographs, where each photo showed a person from the previous photo whispering something to a new person in a different setting, in sort of a graphic version of the game "telephone." Then we had cafe in the cafe by the main atrium space. I'll come back in a few years and see how the building's changed.

Afterwards, Saori split for a haircut appointment, and Aldo and I walked on to the international fair down by the planetarium in the massive parks of Palermo. Aldo had discovered it on his morning run down there while they were setting up. The fair was really cool, a series of booths selling food, drinks, and handcrafts from each of the countries, actually sold by nationals. This was really interesting because it really highlighted which countries had the biggest representation in Argentina. There were quite a few Brazil booths, so we stopped for a Caphirina, a lot from Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Italy, Spain, and Germany. Also a fair number of middle eastern countries, a few African countries, and even Colombia and Cuba. The only country which seemed to be missing was the United States. We continued walking and stopped for a beer at a German booth, and by the time we'd reached the end of the booths, we were ready to sit down for awhile. After relaxing a bit, we reversed our path, picking up bits of food from each country that looked good, sampling and snacking all the way back to where we started. A good dinner.